<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Empirical Observation by ArcadianDriftwood</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28662582">Empirical Observation</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArcadianDriftwood/pseuds/ArcadianDriftwood'>ArcadianDriftwood</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Co-workers, F/M, Scientific inquiry, Slow Burn, good things come to those who wait, slytherin tactics</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:14:51</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>634</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28662582</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArcadianDriftwood/pseuds/ArcadianDriftwood</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Snape embarks on an experiment to break Granger's extremely earnest composure. (Rating for later chapter)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Hermione Granger/Severus Snape</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>28</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Empirical Observation</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Severus Snape enjoyed a great deal about his postwar job as a cursebreaking Unspeakable within the Department of Mysteries.  The hours were better, and dealing with mindless bureaucracy was an apparition across the room compared with the mind-games of a narcissistic megalomaniac.  While the lack of intrigue was occasionally boring, there was something deeply reassuring about having a proper retirement plan (one that consisted of more than “don’t get killed”).</p><p>The one thing he did not enjoy was her.</p><p>With others, he knew she was stroppy and sarcastic.  With him, she was excruciatingly earnest and apologetic.  With others, she was bossy.  With him, she hovered.</p><p>Severus hated when people hovered.  He had hated when Dumbledore used to hover over him, making him feel twelve and inept. And he hated it when Granger hovered beside him, dreadfully helpful and keen.  It made it difficult to remember that she was no longer the zealous student she had been a decade ago.</p><p>He wondered what it might take for her to stop treating him like her old schoolmaster.  He wondered if he could get her to snap.  He had once heard her angrily telling off the apprentices in the lab’s antechamber, and had caught a glimpse of her, furious and red and splotchy and glorious.  She had paused to breathe, midrant, and realizing the door was ajar, she closed it and threw up a silencing spell with a sharp twitch of her finger.  When she reentered the room ten minutes later, she was pale and collected and demure.  Ackerly was in tears and Barkis had to take the rest of the day off.</p><p>That was the day he developed his strategic experiment to discompose Granger.</p><p>He started small, carefully gauging her reaction.  He began to vary his formerly meticulous working hours, occasionally arriving before her and occasionally swooping into the laboratory a good half hour after he knew she’d arrived.  One day, about three weeks in, he prepared tea and a plate of toast with orange marmalade and left them on her desk.  She noticed while hanging up her cloak, letting go of it a full five inches away from the hook on the wall.  Snape smirked to himself as she scrambled to pick it up.</p><p>One or two days a week, he opted to remain almost totally silent for the entirety of the working day. That first morning, she was finishing a report, so there was minimal change in their routine.  But the following day, a cursed girdle was brought in from an archaeological dig in Norton Fitzwarren, and she (nervously at first) filled in his silence with her own theories and hypotheses, his only contribution the occasional hum of positive interest or a cocked eyebrow.</p><p>After two months of this, he was pleased to find her growing intellectually bolder, making innovative connections and pursuing avenues of cursebreaking that even he would not have thought of.  He began verbally engaging her more, their discussions almost approaching banter at times.  However, when they were not in the throes of research, Hermione Granger remained diffident and circumspect.  Clearly, it was time to increase the pressure.</p><p>The following Monday, Hermione arrived at the lab to find her partner ensconced at his desk behind a veritable wall of reference books, balls of parchment littered on the floor about him.  He nodded his head as she entered, and she noticed a long streak of ink on the side of his prodigious nose.  Under ordinary circumstances, she would have tactfully murmured something about it (her mother having instilled in her the habit of quickly and discreetly drawing attention to any problems that could be fixed in ten seconds).  However, on this particular Monday, tactful murmurs were completely impossible, as Snape was blasting “The Velvet Underground &amp; Nico” so loudly that her ribs quaked.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Slightly late for Snape's birthday, but it still counts in the US!  I have no beta, so any mistakes are mine alone.  Hope you enjoy this first installment - comments bring me life!  Great love out there....</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>